


Fellow Outcasts

by Adsecula, PermianExtinction



Series: Tropoverse Canon [7]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Aftermath - Chuck Wendig
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Angst, Belligerent Sexual Tension, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Child Abuse, Character Death Fix, Child Soldiers, Enemies to Lovers, Eventual Fluff, Eventual Smut, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mental Health Issues, Political and Philosophical Mid-Life Crises, Sharing a Bed, Sickfic, mentions of self harm
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-19
Updated: 2018-10-03
Packaged: 2019-06-29 14:11:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 16,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15731019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adsecula/pseuds/Adsecula, https://archiveofourown.org/users/PermianExtinction/pseuds/PermianExtinction
Summary: Until the Battle of Jakku, Rae Sloane held fast to the belief that men like Gallius Rax were a corruption, but the true ideals of the Empire she has been loyal to could still be saved.Now, thanks to the vagaries of mystical Jakkuvian energy, Sloane can’t dispose of Rax so easily, and is forced to confront the violence and isolation of war and command with an increasingly unstable moral framework. As she struggles to lead the nascent First Order, Sloane finds the only person who could understand and validate her pain is the one who caused it.But Rax’s own convictions are shattered after a humiliating defeat and near-death. If he is to take this second life as a chance at reinvention, he must find something new to believe in.It would be wrong to admit weakness, wrong to indulge loneliness, wrong to forgive too easily, wrong to chase after old temptations. Then again, it would be wrong to doubt the legitimacy of the Empire…





	1. If Wishes Were Starships

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Adsecula](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adsecula/gifts).



> This fic is based on an AU created by myself and Adsecula (pileofsith on tumblr) and as she is an artist it comes with art that I might add to the fic directly when the second chapter goes up but the link is pileofsith.tumblr.com/post/173273407380/i-dont-know-where-hes-going-i-dont-know-where
> 
> and it really is lovely~

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sloane can't help but want to relive the last fight that gave her a clarity of purpose.

_She feels more at home in this well-furnished cell than anywhere else in the fleet. It’s a realization she avoids putting into words until it catches her off guard in the dark, between cycles of sleep. Beyond these walls, aboard the famed flagship dreadnought known as the Eclipse, she is stretched too thinly to recognize herself. The future of the Order depends on her vigilance, after all. Yet this room contains and condenses her, as long as he is here with her._

_Rae Sloane’s prisoner nestles his nose deeper into her hair. His breaths tickle her scalp and cool her flushed skin, causing shivers to run down her spine. The arm around her chest is hypnotically steadying. What affirms her is the reminder of the physical. She has a body, one of definite dimensions, mass and shape. Of course, there’s something dreadful and vulnerable about having a body, too._

_She can’t hold her thoughts together, everything flows out like hands cupping water, but she notes the memory of the last time she shared a bed. It’s so much longer ago than she expected. Long enough that she can’t recall if it felt like this, or if this is something new._

_The fever still addles her mind, and weighs her back down into dreaming._

 

Sloane has already pried Rax for information and got all she could on the Emperor’s final destructive plan, and anything other secrets of the Empire he’d had access to. He knows less than she had hoped and more than she expected, and she realizes this at the same time he does. Palpatine strung him along with vague metaphors and narrow directions, and when she presses him for details and facts and rational answers, he’s as appalled as she is to find nothing to serve as a solid foundation. She remembers the vague drivel of the anchorites back on Jakku, and it turns out Gallius Rax has been given only vague drivel to make sense of for his entire life.

She finds the patience for this new hobby, the project of untangling what Rax knows, when the rest of her duties are driving her mad. Soon she can guess why Palpatine fed his mind with opera and shah-tezh and whatever else amused the old ghoul. As they’re piecing together the Emperor’s plans, Sloane learns how much Rax saw of Palpatine himself, what kind of man the Emperor was (as painful as it is for her to admit), and how many clues to the truth Rax kept in his mind without ever fitting them together.

He can tell her things no one else knows, because he never knew them until now. There are hidden resources stashed out in the Unknown Regions. Traps, too, even more prongs to the dreadful Contingency, which she knows by a new name — _Cinder_. The sentinel droids, he tells her, they’re more than they seem. Too intelligent. She disposes of them, sacrifices three ships to blast them into oblivion. The mind control chips he made use of, there’s more to them as well. Networks of artificial intelligence waiting to reach into _any_ mind, chip or not. He doesn’t know this — but he suspects, feels it like an instinct. He could be lying, but it’s a risk she can’t take. And then sometimes he’s spelling out incomplete but grave warnings about something _waiting_ out here, in the darkness.

No surprise that the old anchorite from Jakku found him so hard to contain. Those scriptures and parables kept most of the children sated, but Galli was always ravenous, digesting their platitudes and starving for more. It took someone as devious as Palpatine to have enough lies to soothe that hunger.

And Sloane isn’t so devious, nor does she intend to be. Rax doesn’t deserve the comfort of pretense. She wants his sins and secrets answered for.

 

“You were old enough to be her father!” she spits out at one point, the words tasting foul after so long of holding her tongue.

Sitting up on his cot, arms encircling his knees, Rax is an implacable void of emotion, but his gaze is stabbing into her. “You killed her, didn’t you?” he says. "Miss Rite."

It comes out so casually, like he’s asking what Sloane ate for breakfast.

A chill spreads under her skin of her cheeks, as the blood drains away. “She attacked me,” Sloane says, but she has already flinched, arms pulling in to cross defensively over her stomach. Did she have to pull the trigger, when the gun was in her hands? Did she have to aim for the heart?

And of course Rax sees that fearful moment and drops his legs, leans in from where he’s sitting, the hawk folding its wings for a sudden plummeting attack. “Old enough to be a soldier. Old enough to die, to kill, on command. You’re missing the point.”

Her pulse is pounding, so how can her skin still feel so cold? Sloane drops her fists to her sides, plants her feet in the ground. She won’t let him win this point; he’s trying to confound her. Anything to infect her mind with doubt, with rot and corruption. Wouldn’t he love to turn her allegiance, have her question everything the Empire built itself on, just so he could seize it and twist it however he wanted? She doesn’t know how yet, but of course he’s wrong. He’s a monster, a perversion. Any necessary evil she doubts herself on, is an evil he would _enjoy_.

She wants to end this experiment, destroy him before it’s too late. But if she can’t resist this, she can’t rule over anything. “I’m not—” Abruptly, her throat tightens in disgust. “You think _children_ are old enough to be soldiers!” she hisses. The orphans from Jakku were the only soldiers he intended to take with him. The ones Sloane found huddled together aboard the getaway vessel. They're still in training, still with the fleet. Technically, they serve under her.

He laughs, harsh and loud enough that she startles, the nausea receding as a fight or flight urge takes over. “As if children won’t do every nasty, vicious thing you can dream up. They’ll do it willingly — what’s the difference?” His eyes rake over her, and then his features soften and he settles back. It’s a smug, cruel mercy, though he seems surprised, too. His voice is quieter. “My, Sloane. you’re trembling.”

He may have released her from his talons, but now it feels like she’s falling, falling from such a great height that it comes to feel like floating instead. Is there nothing left to hold on to? “… If they were so willing, why did you need Hux?”

Rax laughs again, but this time it’s more of a dismissive snort.

She’s asking, but she doesn’t have answers. It just seems like she could pull him down with her, just as the fleets dragged each other to their doom over Jakku. “Why did you need to _train_ them, Galli?”

There’s no response from him, this time, not a sound.

“Why didn’t they just…”

“They did. They do. You could never understand, could you? Everyone grows up so _soft_. You think a child doesn’t know what an empty stomach means? What happens when you’re too sick, too badly hurt? They know what survival is, they know what they’re doing, they can think, they can choose.” For a moment his eyes glint with fanatic clarity. “They can choose to _live!_ ”

Sloane stares, lips half-parted. “That’s not…” Still floating, still falling. “Choices _mean_ something. What— what could it mean if a child chooses to die?”

It’s as if her own wings have snapped open. But it is too sudden an impact, a wrenching blow to fragile, hollow bones. She thinks — _it will bruise_.

 

Alone, Sloane stands silent guard over her prisoner in the training hall as he works the leg and shoulder back into usable condition. It would be too much like mercy to let a bacta tank put him back together. She can’t bring herself to order one prepared for him. Instead, his body heals as well it is able.

It is slow to heal now, slower the further they retreat into the Unknown Regions, but it doesn’t stop altogether.

This is the same hall where the subadult troopers spar to let out their violent urges towards each other, just as the adult troopers on Jakku settled scores under Rax’s oh-so-vaunted counsel to the Empire. He might as well have been running a pirate gang.

Rax is unresponsive to the machines that force his body into pushing back against them. He must find them humiliating, at least from how listless and vacant his expression becomes when he’s strapped to them. But he does push back against them, walking as if against a powerful wind, straining his upper body as if rowing upstream.

It is to be studied, Sloane reminds herself. He is an anomaly.

She does not like to dwell on the moment she discovered this anomaly. Was her decision to carry him off clouded by thoughts of horror holos and eerie campfire stories? Bizarrely, she recalls thinking of Hylemane Lightbringer, he of ancient times who claimed to be unkillable, that she once compared to Palpatine. She hasn't tried beating Rax to death with a chair. And she hasn't tried detonating a planet-sized object under him, either. Some claim that practitioners of the Dark Side can sustain themselves through mortal injury. There is such obstinacy to how his body repairs itself; almost against his will.

In a state of partial undress, Rax is dappled with old, faded scars. They are faint, on the edge of visibility, and only brought out in the right light, under the right sheen of sweat, with enough blood flowing under his skin to lessen his pallor, but they are endlessly complex once noticed. Aboard the Ravager, Rax once kept a tapestry patterned so intricately that the shapes seemed to shift and swim. His own skin now produces the same effect.

This time, he catches her staring.

“You want something.”

Sloane wants plenty of things.

“Vengeance,” he offers, with a humorless curling smile.

“I’ve had that.”

He lets his triceps slacken, and the handles he’s gripping pull his arms up over and behind his head. As if he’s chained up. And he could be; there are bands on his wrists that would snap together into manacles on Sloane’s command. But, straddling the workout bench, his pose is infuriatingly, aggressively coy.

Inviting her closer, and it’s clearly a trap.

The largest scars on his body are fully on display. It has been a while since they were swollen and soft and oozing, but they’re still a riotous red, gnarled like wood, pieces of flesh still trying to sew themselves back together on his shoulders, his leg, his gut.

“Just a pantomime of it,” he says. “Hardly satisfying. It slaked your thirst as well as saltwater could.”

She knows he’s only needling her because he can do nothing else. How must it feel for him to be so powerless? Except she knows now that it’s all too familiar for him.

The kind of vengeance she sought seems ruined. The moment has passed. How perfectly poised it had been on Jakku, Sloane thinks, when she had lost her fleet, lost the loyalty of her soldiers, lost the future of her cause. The only thing left to do was to become a weapon and to strike. It was the only way forward.

There is a ghost in her mind, Sloane realizes. She’s heard those words before.

Too perfectly poised, wasn’t it? She’d suspected as much, that it had all been prepared for her, but she didn’t know what it could mean.

“You’re not wrong, _Counselor_.” As she turns away from him, she feels satisfaction from not taking his bait. “Vengeance is in order. But I’m not a sand-blasted vagabond anymore.” _Unlike some…_ “I’ll let you watch the New Republic pay for its crimes. You take too much credit for simply standing back and letting them reign.”

“No vengeance for your dear Rebel friend, then?”

Sloane considers Brentin Wexley. Should she be feeling something for him, the enemy of her enemy? And in some ways, a friend. That she feels nothing makes her uneasy, but not for obvious reasons. If he were unimportant to her, she could resent his death for resentment’s sake.

“Perhaps he lived,” she offers slowly. It’s the first time she considered it. Yes, that must be the case, she is more certain by the second. Brentin suffered no worse than Rax. And with all things being equal…

“What does it matter, if I meant to kill him?”

She thinks back to the two men struggling over the blaster. Her rage is still quiet, uncomfortably quiet. Brentin may have been the aggressor, but he’d been fighting for her sake. Or, she must concede, for his own revenge. He’d been used, too.

It is hard to say which she prefers. That he was sensible, not sentimental, motivated only by his own interests? Or that he would throw his life away for her, haplessly ignorant? Of course she kept the truth from him, the truth about Chandrila, the truth about her past encounters with his wife and son. It must have been the shock of grief that gave Norra any room for pity. Would Sloane ever forgive someone who had tried to kill her own—

“You spared him,” Sloane says. Had done so when they’d been captured, at her own urging. Is she really trying to absolve blame? Yet this is what reignites her hate. She has never hated Rax more.

 _Spared him, to let him suffer a worse fate. The fate meant for me as well. And everyone else on that barren rock._ She waits for this response.

“What of Adea, then?” Rax is saying flatly, _wrongly_. He’s not supposed to concede. The usual preening cruelty is buried somewhere in his face — if Sloane could just find it. “No vengeance for her?”

Sloane balls her fists. “Did you want to avenge her?”

This hurls him off course; his eyes grow wide. Then they harden, and he stands up from his bench. “I hardly expected you to put it like that.”

She hadn’t meant to.

“So this is what you were after.” He sounds almost curious, stepping forward to inspect her with a scrutiny that slices into her so thinly it doesn’t hurt, and it should. “We’re in the right place for it.”

Sloane sets her jaw haughtily and squares her shoulders. “You put so much faith in letting your armies beat their squabbles out of each other. Why don’t you show me how that’s supposed to keep order? I would love to be enlightened.”

He gives her a familiar sneer, as if for old times’ sake. “I would love to _enlighten_ you.”

Rax’s words stir up the blood beneath Sloane’s skin. She feels certain of herself again, aiming ahead with a single mark. It pulls her, just as it did on Jakku, but she doesn’t need to let everything go to chase this feeling. It can always be here, ready to _complete_ her whenever a piece of herself is lost — sacrificed to her eternal duty as commander, founder, foremother.

Her own ghost takes hold of her tongue. “If wishes were starships…”

“I could have killed you last time,” he says abruptly, his black eyes now cold and wary.

Sloane eyes the cuffs. If she tells them to hold him, they will. The question is whether she would use that measure, if it meant conceding defeat.

She lifts her fists. “Prove it.”

 

There’ll be no more trickery. They’ve fought in his arena, as beasts in a lawless wasteland, and now this is hers. A flat mat, nothing but honor on the line, taut skin outlining muscle and bone, the only weapons they can carry. And rules, if unspoken ones, so long as he wants to live.

Last time, she made the first move. He’s a chess player, isn’t he? Or that older form, shah-tezh, but the same idea applies. White opens the game. But the last round’s winner plays black.

They’re circling, and his eyes are combing over her body, searching for weakness or softness. Or pretending to, making a show of it. A seasoned fighter wouldn’t let his eyes telegraph an attack. She expects he won’t go for the gut right away, it’s too obvious a trap. Though it’s concealed by her top, it’s as if she left it open for him, with how, like his old wounds, it’s still knotted and purpled with bruising under the fabric, flesh misshapen from the hastily injected matrix of bacta. She remembers how that hurt, hurt as much to heal it as having it punched opened again.

It’s his move — but he’s not taking it. Waiting for her impatience to distract her.

Sloane drops her fists, relaxes her stance, a disdainful gesture. “Not so cocksure in a fair fight?”

Rax steps forward, and dons the mask of genial calm. “But when have I been unfair to you, Sloane?”

He might as well have spit in her eye. She owes him no answer, but he’ll relish her silence; this defeat from either angle is the cruelest thing he could spear through her chest. He hasn’t touched her, and she’s choking down bile already.

As he closes in, in that dreadfully casual way, as if he couldn’t possibly hurt her, she forces herself to be still. She won’t be made a fool of again. But isn’t he mocking her the way he always did, by letting her squirm and suppress her rage?

She can’t blink and give him an opening. Her eyes are watering. Blurring, spilling.

He halts. “I thought this was my vengeance,” he says. “For Adea.”

“I _know_ you didn’t care about her.” Sloane is tired, tired of being played with, tired of being denied. “For whoever or whatever you like.”

It takes him a second to find the answer he needs, but then his face twists with wrath, and he’s coming in with a fist straight for her chin.

 

She blocks him, dodges the next one. Cuts in and tries to unbalance him with a hook, and he catches her fist trying to turn it aside, scraping the skin with his nails. She ends up freeing herself with a backhand under his chin, and he stumbles, reels, then finds his footing and rams her with his shoulder.

As the air heaves out of her lungs, she meets him with a tackle and then their arms are locked around each other’s shoulders, boxing turned to wrestling, clutching so tightly it’s as if they’re trying to pop each other’s heads off as one might the cork from a bottle.

He snarls and cries out as he struggles, kicking and clawing and snapping at her with his teeth.

When she tries to shove his head away with her forearm, he _bites_ — and she doesn’t even flinch as he’s hanging on. And he doesn’t flinch while she hammers her knuckles into his temples, into his eyes. The pain is nothing but a drone in the background.

The need to win is so much sharper than before, though she would never have believed it possible. Whatever Sloane is fighting for, it’s worth more than revenge, more than the Empire. Whatever Rax is fighting for, it’s worth more than his life.

There’d been unspoken rules, and Sloane breaks them, on impulse. She kicks Rax in his bad leg, and it buckles. But, with single-minded efficiency, he drags her down with him, his fingers wrapped in her undershirt, which stretches instead of tearing from how sweat-soaked it is.

They’ve been here before, and he’s making a mistake; Sloane never loses a bout the same way twice. She hadn’t been the strongest or nimblest boxer in her league, but she placed because she couldn’t forget an insult, even if she tried. If she closes her eyes, she can see every moment someone’s ever slighted her or won the upper hand. Vivid and fresh, like it happened seconds ago, an unsolved equation. As if her brain is as much a computer as the mad cyborg Vidian’s, but just for this, just for smarting indignation.

That one is there, among so many, the petty and the mighty. Kotaska, Dasha, Emil, Baylo, Vidian, Kanan, Lero, Suvo, Tarkin, Lyle, Pandion, Obdur, Hux, Adea, Niima, Norra, _Rax_.

One memory slots into place. She needs to pin him down, grab his wrists. Splay them flat, bent just so, so only the weakest muscles in his arms can push back.

She has one down, he battles with her for the other, trying to twist his body out from under her straddling hold and either restrain her or push himself off the floor, depending on where she ends up. His features have twisted, a sustained guttural snarl exhaling from his chest.

Her fingers slip on sweat, and she sees his eyes flash with intent. On instinct, she guards her chest—

… she should have known better.

Sloane never loses the same way twice. But oh, so many times, has she lost. _Always relitigating. Always licking your wounds. If you run, you can win later, in your head, but you’re not fighting for anything — you just want to be right! Come on, Ri-ri. Look in front of you. Look ahead. What could you lose?_

There are ghosts she has forgotten, aren’t there? Wiped clean from her mind. Because she couldn’t ever answer them. Couldn’t think too long on what it meant.

Rax strikes like a serpent — aims right for the neck. His grip closing around her windpipe.

Forgotten - what Rax said to her, about the first man he ever killed. _I crushed his throat with my bare hands!_

Sloane gags, tries to wrench Rax’s fingers away. Her lips are already numb and tingling from cut circulation. But she can breathe, even if it’s a hoarse dry rattle.

Her hand flies to her hip instead, fumbling for the switch that would put an end to this. But it would be concession. Admitting she’s fighting for fighting’s sake.

There’s no winning this one. Not the way she has to win to make it mean anything. A now-familiar despair pulls her under.

So she goes back to prying open the chokehold, but sinking down, eyelids falling half-shut. As if she’s alone, as if this is an empty hall for her to conceal a fit of psychosomatic spasms. As if her own body is doing this to her.

Maybe it is. It seems as plausible as being throttled by a dead man’s hand. Isn’t he just another ghost? This is a galaxy of miracles, but sometimes there are mere dreams, and delusions.

Fingers migrate to the back of her neck, tugging on the short hairs there. Not so much on her throat. Drawing breath aches for a second, and then it starts to ease.

Her eyes open, and she sees her enemy below her, alive and solid. Rax wears a bitter sneer, as if he’s the one losing. Sloane still has one of his wrists pressed to the mat. He’s straining to lever his chest up, clinging to the hair at the base of her scalp for support.

She sees bared teeth, staring at her mouth with such ferocity, as if he wants to bite at it, tear it. He strains closer, hovering just a thread’s breadth away, so close she does feel him, in the fine hairs of the skin above her lip.

Close enough that the same breath of air leaving his lungs, fills hers. Air that tastes like a desert night, arid but cool.

Below them, on the mat, she spots a discoloration, a stain. Dyeing the synthfiber, dried and days old: blood. It must be one of the children’s.

Sloane wrenches herself away, rolling off Rax to rebound to her feet, and he surges up and tries to catch her, snaring her waist with his arms, aiming to topple her before she can steady her stance.

And then — at first she can’t comprehend it — a blow to her gut that whites out her vision and mind with pain. Moments later, her throat is sore and her ears are ringing, and it’s how she knows she was screaming. There is a crushing pressure on her lower ribs that’s forcing bone into some organ, and it’s not going away, and if she has to scream again she’s going to rip her enemy to shreds first, with her bare hands.

She’s falling, her skull smacks against the mat and stuns her as she’s vainly struggling to free herself, viciously and desperately lashing out with her elbows at the presence clinging to her back, all while a voice is yelling in her ear, but she can’t think straight enough to understand it.

Until it’s fainter, and so is her consciousness, but she can hear him gasping, “The belt, on the belt.”

The belt? She realizes — the control box for the handcuffs are on her belt. It’s small, hidden, unassuming. Rax wouldn’t have known where it was, if Sloane hadn’t reached for it earlier. But she had. She’d started to pull it.

It must have happened when he lunged to drag her down — the switch was knocked all the way. The bands around his wrists are trying to lock themselves together, but her body is caught between them. Between two chunks of electrically magnetized dymium, a bomb-launcher when polarized to repel instead of attract.

She finds the switch, gasps with relief as the vise is released.

The throbbing, bruising pain returns within seconds, as blood rushes towards her wounded side. It takes her senses again, muffling her hearing and blurring her vision. Agony ticks by, starts to ebb once more.

A strained, disbelieving whimper, from above. Sloane turns her head.

Rax is crouched over her, mouth hanging open. Vivid red is staining his chest. A drop of liquid hits the back of Sloane’s palm, where she’s clutching her side.

He groans again, and sinks down next to her, curling up and voicing unsteady, wheezing breaths. Though it aches to move, Sloane sits halfway up and realizes Rax is spilling fresh blood from a rupture in his abdomen.

A lot of blood, leaking around his fingers. Forming a pool.

She thinks she’s already unconscious and dreaming, until her vision focuses. It doesn’t seem possible that her thrashing blows could have torn him open like this. What happened to that miraculous healing, that sustained him ever since she shot him on Jakku? Has he been this frail the whole time, on the verge of cracking like an egg? Does his body know it’s supposed to be dead? Sloane knows too, with utter certainty, that these are mortal wounds.

He’s staring up at her with wide, wet, fearful eyes.

“I don’t want to die,” Rax says faintly. As if this must be said. It sounds incomplete, too, a qualifier. There is blood on his tongue, he swallows it down. “But I wish I’d never _been_.”

Hazily, it occurs to her that he’d been crying out, desperately, while she’d been trapped by the handcuffs. It had been an accident this time, and she hadn’t really meant to hurt him, either.

Next to the control box is her commlink. She sets it to the nearest security detail. “Send medical droids to my position,” she rasps. “Intensive care. And have… have a bacta tank prepared.” Then her strength gives out and she lays back down, counting breaths in the pattern she remembers learning in… what was it? Ah. Resisting enhanced interrogation.

Beside her, a different pattern of breaths. More rapid, but rhythmic, just like hers. Meant for the same purpose, no doubt. A tremulous voice. “Who… who will avenge them?”

“Avenge who?”

“The others…”

She makes a guess, on instinct. “The other children.” The orphans on Jakku, but not the ones she has met. The first ones he spirited away, when he was also just an orphan boy.

“I killed them. To keep his secrets.”

The secrets he’s given her. He hasn’t kept them. Is that what this is about? The sacrifice meant nothing, in the end.

His grimace of pain reshapes itself, into anguish. “It wasn’t a choice, I never had a choice. Couldn’t choose to die.” He snivels, sucking in moisture, letting out air in stuttering little sobs. “I don’t _know_. I don’t know what… I would have chosen, then. But _you_ let me choose and I chose _wrong_.”

She turns her head to get a clearer look at him. _He’s trying to say_ , informs a thought, _that he’s sorry_.

 

When the droids show up, clanking on stiff legs, they load Rax onto a stretcher and prop Sloane up so she can walk. She’s not sure if she trusts them, and she can’t be sure if she’d trust any of the personnel on the ship either, but the droids are the least complicated threat.

If they were organics, no matter how they addressed her, she might feel like a prisoner being escorted through the halls, as if back in the Jakku compound. She could be anywhere; Imperial architecture doesn’t differ from place to place. It’s all sharp gray and white lights like windows into a blank void. In private, Sloane always hated halls like these, and she was once jovial about it — if you need windows, put some work into it, and one day you might command a star destroyer.

The Eclipse is surely the largest ship she has ever commanded. Right now it’s so big compared to the population of the Order that it’s not fully manned. There’s room for silent, empty halls.

Those halls remind Sloane of the ghost blocks on Ganthel back in the Republic days. Houses bought when work was good and steady and sold again when it went bad. 

She doesn’t want to think about her homeworld, or Jakku, or the rest of the fleet. Thankfully the pain is a distraction.

The droids do offer her painkillers when they reach the medbay, which she accepts because they might let her rest. And she needs them to pulls her thoughts together enough to consider who to delegate command to. It would help if she had an aide, but she hasn’t let anyone near that position.

They load Rax into the tank as she deliberates. He slumps against the back wall of the empty transparisteel column, smearing red on the floor. When the sustenance tube is pushed over his nose and mouth, he struggles briefly, flashing teeth in a feral snarl, before he gives up and lets the intrusion in. A line of saliva runs down his chin. He flinches when the column is sealed shut. Sloane, who has never been in a tank, has heard it’s preferable to be unconscious when the fluid starts filling the chamber, if you have a fear of drowning, tight spaces, being buried alive.

In the end Sloane makes no delegation. If she is vital to the Order, it will keep her alive, and she will recover quickly. If she is not…

 _Imperator_ , she thinks. Is this the Contingency? Though she believed the evidence, Sloane could not understand it until now.

The Emperor laid down the plan to kill his Empire if it failed him. But why? Did he plan to die? What good did the plan do for him alive?

He was a monster, she agreed, and one who made mistakes.

And yet— this was madman’s logic and finally it makes sense. He believed in the game. He believed in the Empire, as if it were a single organism, a child under his cruel thumb. He believed in the Empire’s desire to survive above all. It would have the power to save itself, and so save _him_ , preserve his life for all eternity, if he made sure it could not survive without him.

Sloane lays back on her cot while spindly droid arms dig into her injured side with sharp glinting instruments. She feels nothing as they open the wound and pull apart scar tissue. Eventually, they lay a patch of gel over it, and she can imagine it being a fat translucent blood-slug, the kind used in archaic, barbaric medicine. There is a story — she has always taken interest in these odd ironies from history — about an ancient queen who died drained by blood-slugs meant to treat some illness. But they had taken so much of her royal person that, in the absence of an heir, the bloated things were crowned her successor.

And this did just fine. So there had never been a need for that queen, any queen. The throne lives through whatever sac of flesh sits upon it.

No wonder Palpatine made his plan. The throne, his dearest enemy, had to be made to submit.

Then where was he wrong? Why did the Empire let him die, let itself die?

Because, crafts the speechwriter, it was destined to be greater than him. Fire-forged. When his arrogance was too great, it destroyed him so it could be reborn.

Because, hums the void, the Empire was never so powerful. Some things die even as they struggle to survive.

Because, sighs the ghost, all things die — but some live for their death as much as they fear it. Some yearn for it, so long as it can be a _vengeance_.

Vengeance on a universe that brought them into being, only to fear the inevitability of ending. _If you meant to snuff me out, why was I ever made?_

Sloane wakes to a throbbing ache situated under the bacta gel slug. The fog of treacherous, alien ideas recedes before she can wonder where it came from.

The ship has moved into its artificial night, dimming the room in response to her stillness. The brightest well of light comes from the tank across the room, where the body of a man clinging to life twitches and shakes, wracked by nightmares.


	2. Then We Would Fly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Complications continue to arise when keeping a former rival prisoner: complicated politics, complicated ethics, and complicated desires.

 

Everything the Emperor’s Outcast held to be real — Sloane watches it all be stripped away cycle after cycle, watches his ego flush out of his body like a toxin. It seems excruciating. There are tears and screams and days without speaking a word. She finds him with self-inflicted injuries, mostly worrying at and aggravating his wounds. She catches him hiding uneaten food, as if he expects it to be his last meal. He breaks most of the items of luxury or comfort she allows him, pulls apart the threads of his bedclothes. Besides keeping him healthy, Sloane sees no point in intervening. 

When he is calmer, it is a frail, damaged calm, but he’s not fighting. He knows he is empty — whatever he can find, fills the hollow. Having become nothing, he can rebuild into anything. 

She thinks she might be envious of it. 

Drawn to it, even. 

Rax passes a hand through a holoprojection of Sloane’s ships ringing a planet, disturbing them in their formation. The emitter rests on his knee.

The planet is a fiction, the scenario is an invention. A test, but there isn’t a right answer.

Sloane knows what passes for her inner circle in the Order is the same circle carrion birds form over a carcass. But they hold back as long as she is an unfathomable link that keeps them in balance. None of them know how extensive her maps of the Unknown Regions are, and everything from hidden resource-rich planets to hyperspace shortcuts would change the playing field. Predictably, the fleet commanders keep to themselves the most potent scraps of charting knowledge she lets them use. Most of them are waiting for a chance to consolidate power, but she can rely on their patience, venal as it is, to keep each other in check.

She can’t always imagine every way a piece of charting information could be used, so she has started seeking out second opinions from a mind whose machinations she once found arcane.

Knowledge is power, as it had always been, as she learned from her two greatest foes.  _ See everything. _ A familiar ghostly voice — Count Vidian, the cyborg efficiency expert she took down on her first starship command — blowing in her mind like a radiator fan, mechanically synthesized.  _ You know more than most.  _ This one a sensual, sinister purr. 

“You’re afraid,” the same voice says, aloud. 

Sloane’s mind is elsewhere, chin propped against the back of a curled fist. Returning to the conversation strains her attention. She can’t say if he’s right; she feels more annoyed than afraid. “That’s for me to worry about. Why don’t you continue?” 

He does not continue. “Afraid of me? But why? You wouldn’t keep me alive if I posed a risk.”

Rax doesn’t know what little choice Sloane had in keeping him _alive_. The question was in keeping him, the where and the how. She could have splattered his brains on the sand, or tossed his body into that gaping maw of a borehole. But what monster could creep up behind her one day, years later, hideously transformed by whatever she did to him? If she atomized him, he might have chased her as a malevolent cloud of gas — the Gallius Nebula? Or worse, he would be as dead as a Death Star but she would live in paranoia, jumping at shadows for the rest of her life.

Did Palpatine make him like this? Or is he some rare breed of creature that served the Emperor’s purposes? Rax seems unaware of his own freakish body. A body that refuses to die. Sloane knows nothing of sorcery, nothing significant of the Force, and has no one who could offer expertise, so she’s flying blind. 

“I have been known to take risks. Following the advice of a dying maniac. Charging headfirst into uncharted space.” 

Rax keeps his eyes on the hovering, miniaturized star destroyers. Once, her words might have delighted him. He is pensive, instead, when he says, “And you’d still rather be here than anywhere else in the Order.”

“I…”

“Is there a threat?” he asks quietly.

She settles back in her chair, fingers laced. It always unnerves her when he shows concern. “No more than usual,” she tells him. “But if that’s on your mind, continue. Your assessment of the scenario.”

“Minimal casualties?” Rax cups a holographic ship in his hands, mockingly tender. Like he’s holding a baby bird. “Of course.”

“Sometimes commanders _don’t_ destroy their own fleets,” she points out. 

Sloane is shocked to discover where the next threat comes from, and where it aims. Not at her. 

Her office console alerts her that detention cell A3-5739 has been unlocked. She wants to leap out of her seat, but that reflex is buried under protocol, and she pulls up the security feed.

The cell is not empty; there’s been no jailbreak. There’s been an intrusion. One figure is doubled over on the ground — that’s Rax, that’s his gray jumpsuit, body all angles and starved limbs — while a second is jabbing an electrified baton into their victim’s gut. Tinny screams of agony ring out from the speakers. There’s no mistaking the identity of the intruder either. Tall, fat, red hair. 

Sloane slams her fist against the intercom button. “ _I will skin you alive, Hux!_ ” she roars. “ _But I’ll do it extra slowly if you don’t drop your weapon!_ ” 

Not waiting for compliance, Sloane stabs at another button and brings down the interrogator droid from its alcove in the ceiling. With unnatural swiftness, as if he’s raging under a spice trip, Brendol Hux takes a swing at the arm bristling with implements of torture, trying to bash it away with the baton. But Sloane has her fingers wrapped around the manual controls, and Hux’s technique is as grotesquely poor as ever. With a few sharp motions, the droid is dodging around the attack and burying its needles into the man’s chest.

Sloane shows magnanimous restraint. The drugs paralyze. If she wanted, she could have them stop his heart. 

“You stay put,” she warns Rax curtly, as he starts to sit up. 

She marches into the detention block, flanked by troopers. Her first thought is that Rax has disobeyed and fled, which would be a headache of a situation to deal with. But there’s a shape huddled under the cot.

So she points to the man immobilized in an ungainly heap in the middle of the room. Jabs the toe of her boot into Hux’s furious, tongue-tied rictus of an expression. “I’ve had enough of you,” Sloane hisses.

Hux also hisses in response, wordlessly, because it’s all he can manage.

“Should we schedule him for an execution?” the trooper commander at her left asks. 

“This doesn’t quite count as mutiny,” Sloane points out. “Of course, there’s an older mutiny charge I could revoke a pardon of.”

Hux’s facial muscles strain around his eyes, like he wants to close them, but the drug won’t let him. Fluid leaks from them instead.

“I want him stripped of rank and thrown in a cell on the level below this one.” The troopers are already hauling Hux halfway to his feet, and dragging him into the hallways. “Keep him alive, and let me handle the questioning. Don’t let this story spread.” Few aboard this ship, fewer in the fleet, know about Sloane’s prisoner. Of course Hux knew from the beginning. And Sloane had it beaten into him once before that, as far as he was concerned, Gallius Rax was dead. 

This, though? This is unexpected. 

The armored footsteps clomp slowly to the end of the hall, dragging the paralyzed Hux with them. The turbolift hums. Sloane closes the cell door, sealing these sounds out. 

“Come out of there,” she says. 

Like a kicked whelp, the prisoner pulls his limbs tighter into his hiding space. If he wants to be uncooperative, so be it. It simplifies things for now. Many officers have been caught up in Hux’s vision of a new military structure, and Sloane needs to find which of them would be eager to, at least temporarily, replace him, and which would stay loyal to him and need to be quelled.

Instead of calming down, Rax is hyperventilating. Such… _pathetic_ noises.

Impulse cracks like a whip and Sloane shoves the cot up into its wall alcove. _I said, come out of there!_ she wants to snarl. _I gave an order!_ Exposed at her feet in a fetal position, Rax jolts and shoves a fist between his teeth. Smothering a scream.

“No,” says a voice, which is Sloane’s, coming from her throat, but too even-tempered to possibly be her own. A second impulse has overwritten the first, and she’s completely in its thrall. “None of that.” She is kneeling beside him. “Take my hand.”

Rax’s eyes are open, staring past her knees, across the floor. His jaw relaxes, his fingers slip out. They’re marred with red crescent marks, but he doesn’t seem to have drawn blood. Then those fingers creep across the floor, edging towards Sloane’s outstretched palm. 

They snap around her hand, a pale five-headed snake striking and constricting. Sloane forces her reaction down to a grimace. “Not so tightly,” she whispers.

Her heartbeat hammers in her ears until the pressure gradually lessens. 

“Good,” she tells him. The word smooths his brow, he exhales. “Good.” Sloane clears her throat. “I concede full responsibility for this… unacceptable security breach.” 

“Do not execute Hux.”

Sloane blinks. An acrid taste rises from the pit of her stomach. “Why is he so special?”

“He… merely… exercised his grievances. As you have done.”

“And you’re letting in anyone who wants to exercise their grievances with you?”

Rax’s lips curl up and then bare a grin. “Jealous…?” he rasps.

Maybe she is. It’s an uncomfortable realization.

As Rax recovers into a sitting position against the wall, he pulls his hand away from hers. Preserving both of their dignities. Sloane has seen this before; Rax slips between disorganized despair and a tremulous mask of control. Every time, he comes closer to appearing — almost — human. He had to become nearly human for Sloane to realize she never thought of him as a human before.

Which, in a galaxy full of non-humans, might say more about her than him.

“Sloane,” he says matter-of-factly. The corner of his mouth and cheek is still twitching from aftershocks. He rubs it impatiently. Is he familiar with the effects of electrification? The Emperor could shoot lightning from his fingers, said the murmurs passed from ear to willing ear. “Hux was emboldened by your mercy towards me. How could he respect someone who coddles their enemies? He will not be the last, either. And I am not the only target of grievances.”

Instead of refuting him and his false eloquence, Sloane narrows her eyes. “Do you feel coddled?”

Rax gulps down a mouthful of saliva, and dips his chin, as it starts to tremble.

“You don’t resent me?” Sloane looks over her shoulder at the droid dangling from the ceiling. Rax would know that it wasn’t put there to protect him, although he has never been subjected to its interrogations.

Ever since Akiva, assuring the captured rebel they were not animals — and letting that Dark Side fanatic Tashu, who she was not sorry to hear died by Rax’s hand, prove her wrong — Sloane has been soft. Or perhaps she has always been squeamish about torture. Easier and neater to end a life swiftly, but that choice might be a lost luxury now.

“Those who fail seldom have pleasant fates. And—” Rax sets his jaw. “Neither do those who are born lowly, shaped by lowness. But plans are bigger than one man. If you have made me part of your contingency, I accept that.”

Even with his sparse, rough stubble and pasty skin, normally slicked back hair becoming unruly, his wrinkled prisoner’s jumpsuit, Sloane sees the shadow of a proper officer in him, believing in the system of moving parts. Dignified submission to an ideal. It brings a horribly unexpected pang of bittersweet nostalgia. Because this is the Empire she has longed for, and it is still in its own way detestable.

“Then as part of my plan, you should be kept in better condition,” she says. “And if the Order is a fresh start for the Empire, I must give you credit for good behavior.” She exhales disdain, _pfah_. “As compared to Hux.”

His forehead scrunches up with confusion.

“The officer’s row on the _Eclipse_ is full of amenities that are going unused. I’m offering you better living quarters. If you’re to be a caged beast, it’s as much in my best interest as yours to keep you sane.”

She eyes the floor, this space usually hidden by the bed. It’s a mess, and judging by that, he’s been hiding under here often. Just like a skittermouse. There are crumbs and scraps of cloth, and — Rax’s features actually blotch at this — broken audio chips. They look like they’ve been _chewed_ _on_ , as well as smashed.

He sweeps them behind his back, eyes moist with shame. So that’s what he’s been doing with the music she finally, at long last, tried to offer him, to tame his self-destructive outbursts.

“I don’t need more than this,” he mutters. “It’s all I deserve.”

Sloane stands up. “Asceticism doesn’t suit you. Unless I have need of spiritual guidance, I don’t think I’ll be calling on any anchorites.”

Rax flinches. He must know, but have been unwilling to admit, how much he has come to resemble his old caretaker on Jakku, that miserable monk. His eyes grow wetter, and Sloane tactfully turns away before they overflow.

She forms words, unclear as to their meaning. “I’m sad for you.” Realizing how clumsy they are.

His throat sounds clogged. “How?”

She thinks back to when she’d heard it last. They hadn’t been words of forgiveness, not at all. This feeling has no name. Neither pity nor disgust. She is sad to see a galaxy where someone could become _this_. Whatever _this_ is. Life without purpose. Dreams with no waking. “… I’m just sad.”

He is standing up. And then she hears him slam his foot to the floor. Sloane spins around, startled, seeing fury in a face streaked with tears.

“You must have a _death wish!_ ” he spits. “Fool. Arrogant fool that you are. Pretending your righteousness will save you. You _know_ —!” His words choke off in his anger, giving Sloane time to have her mouth fall open in astonishment. “You know what I am. What I’ve _done!_ ” He closes the gap between them in a few long strides. “To _you!_ ”

“My _righteousness_ ,” she repeats, with such a bitter sting that the anger drains out of Rax’s eyes. “Do you know how many mutinies…”

His hand has shot up to hover under her chin. A reminder of their last fight. But now it slackens, and moves to cup her jawline.

This time, with gentleness, it steals her breath completely. And it makes her sick, as it did when he kissed her brow — _don’t think about that!_ snaps a pathetic, reedy inner voice.

With what seems to be a long last gasp of air, she says, “You left the _worst_ of the Empire on Jakku, the ones mad enough to follow you. And if you were leading this fleet now, I’d say the defectors were the sane ones—”

His thumb quickly presses to her lip. Silencing her. Urging her not to continue. _Please, stars, yes, shut me up_ , she thinks, and briefly is seized by the basest, ugliest thoughts of all the ways he could do it. He has tricked her, hasn’t he, parading self-loathing about as confidence? So she’d start to envy him, and imitate him.

Remember old folktales. The keen-eyed carnack rolls over the coals of a miner’s campfire. Oh, I am so ashamed, he wails, that I cannot be as delicious as a hen. Think of how stringy and gamey my meat would be. Like a mouthful of leather. The workfolk cannot even cook me, though they try.

But that doesn’t remind her of how Rax has been as of late. It makes her think of his prancing and self-effacing on Jakku, and how smugly she walked into the jaws of the Emperor’s contingency.

Sloane is cold. Terribly cold, if Rax’s skin had begun to feel warm.

“How can I make you _see?_ ” he begs. There is deep desperation in his eyes. “Do you think I did not _mean_ what I said? I… I had nothing left to lie for. I wasn’t asking for mercy. You are the only possible contingency.”

“If you want me to believe that, you shouldn’t say it,” Sloane snaps, angry that he seems to have read her thoughts. “Because I’ll never trust you."

Rax deliberates, then nods understanding. “I’ll pull you astray,” he says, his fingers sliding down her chin and holding it lightly before letting go. “I’ll deceive you. Until you see the truth.”

“You’ll never win,” she says. Satisfaction buzzes in her chest.

A deck below, Brendol Hux is huddled against his cell, clutching a couple of sheets of flimsi. When the door opens, he starts stuffing them into his jacket pocket. Sloane tries to pull one away from him, and his muscles are still too weak from the drug to put up much of a fight, but she can tell from how his eyes pierce her that he’d love to kill her over this.

The paper is covered with bird-scratch symbols. It’s not aurebesh, or any other alphabet she’s seen. “What is this cipher?” she asks icily.

“It’s personal. None of your business,” Hux mutters. “But even the best protocol droid couldn’t read it. Don’t waste your time.”

Sloane supposes it doesn’t really matter, and hands it back. “I’d rather talk about what in the hells you thought you were doing.”

“Also personal.” Hux obstinately refuses to look at her.

“I can easily find out,” she warns him. 

“Then do so. I have nothing to add.”

Gone is the previous obsequiousness; Sloane can’t say it warms her heart, but she despises him a tad more measuredly. Honesty is appreciated. “Let’s not beat around the debris field. I expected you’d try to seize power. Unless this is a very long gambit, you’ve just ruined your chances. Why?”

The man shifts his weight on the cot and glares up at her. “I had no chance to begin with. I can’t take your place. To the higher-ups, _you’re_ a cipher. And a fluke. Where are your connections? Your credentials? Before Endor, you were just a cog in the machine, and then you were everywhere.”

Well, the obsequiousness is still there, under the animosity. He’s probably overstating his powerlessness. Sloane has been in much the same position before, trying to get away with going around a superior officer’s back. In fact, all of this rings too familiar. _A cipher, am I?_ she thinks.

“But to the underlings,” he adds, “you’re a symbol. They’ve only ever heard you as the voice of righteousness. Rax’s doing.”

“You’re not as dull as you look,” Sloane says.

The insult falls flat. “Oh, I know. You can get away with a lot by looking dull.” He scoffs. “You’re almost doing something clever here. He tried take over on _your_ merit, claiming to have been your closest confidante. So if your standing seems weak, if you act like you’re barely clinging to power, he doesn’t have an in.”

“Why would he need me? He could have used his connections to Palpatine from the start.”

“You tell me if public opinion of Palpatine has been favorable. Or even private opinion. How long did it take before people began letting treasonous thoughts slip out?”

Not long at all. Even the Emperor’s trusted advisor got in on it, at the Imperial Future Council, not to mention the others.

“Oh, he thought to make you a myth. If the Rebellion had Luke Skywalker, the Empire would have Rae Sloane. The hero who sacrificed herself to destroy the New Republic fleet. There’s a rumor she’s alive, can’t be confirmed, but people wonder. Rax could carry you around as a medal for his collection and embellish as he pleased. It’s so much easier to rule like that.”

Despite her unease, Sloane shrugs. Hux has an angle here; perhaps he’s planned this speech for a while, or it could be coming out in a burst of self-preservation instinct. “Compelling advice. I should trust you instead, is that it? The man who tells it like it is. The subordinate who openly hates me. It could never go wrong.” She rolls her eyes. “I’m not Rax. Rax made the Empire a theater, and forgot that theater actors only _pretend_ their rivalries and dramatics. Behind the scenes, they work together. I don’t need a rogue element.” 

Hux laces his fingers over his stomach and leans back, closing his eyes. “If you’re not going to execute me, you should find a use for me. You could pickle my organs, or lobotomize me, or graft experimental cybernetics to my body—”

“What is _wrong_ with you people?” Sloane barks. She has been holding that one in for what feels like an eternity. 

Hux snorts incredulously. It becomes a open laugh. “You _are_ a fluke,” he says. “Rax wasn’t a complete fool. You’ll be a glorious character for children’s history books; everyone likes an underdog, an outcast.”

“What a weak insult.”

Hux opens one blue eye a crack. “He doesn’t love you.”

“Very perceptive, Hux,” Sloane sneers. The hairs on the back of her neck are all standing on end.

Later, Sloane reviews the footage of the incident. Striding down the hallway, Hux has the shock baton halfway up his sleeve, but it isn’t exactly hidden. The troopers posted by the entrance of the detention block let him pass without questioning his business or commenting on the weapon. That’s what Sloane gets, relying on veterans who’ve served on flagships before — it has taught them all the wrong things. They’re used to status superseding protocol. Used to self-important cads like Hux expecting all doors be held open for them, with a carpet and strewn petals under their feet, unless given special instructions. 

They weren’t given special instructions, as a calculated risk on Sloane’s part. It calls too much attention to have a high security prisoner. Someone would guess, at the very least, that Sloane had a rival locked up, or a valuable hostage. It’s one of the reasons why she wants to move Rax; she can justify tighter security in the Officers’ Row, for the protection of the residents. Rax isn’t officially enlisted anymore, and if he gets caught wandering about, he’ll be deemed a trespasser and detained under stricter protocol. So he’ll remain secret, and secure. _And safe,_ she grudgingly admits. 

The footage from the cell just prior to the intrusion shows Rax lying down on his cot. The sheets and pillows are bunched up into a bulk that he stiffly embraces, one arm and leg thrown over it. He is awake, judging by occasional abrupt movements to settle himself more comfortably, but is preferring to rest. 

There is little for Rax to do besides review the assignments Sloane gives him. Setting the timecode back several minutes, she’s not surprised that he’s hiding under a single sheet, and the fabric is twitching in deliberate, rhythmic motions.

He uses the fresher. Goes back to rest. 

Is it fair to have watched any of it? He can’t expect her not to monitor him, even for his own sake, to stop him from injuring himself too severely. At least he is usually clandestine, and meticulously clean, unlike how he has been with his other exercises of frustration.

Sloane shifts uneasily in her seat, crosses her legs, and leans forward, waiting for the moment of interruption.

And there it is. Rax sits up slowly, then hastily. Bleary calm transforms into a hunted animal’s shock. “ _Where is Sloane?_ ” he demands. Then he tries to compose himself with a haughty tilt of his head. “ _I assume she didn’t send you._ ”

“ _She doesn’t know about this visit,_ ” Brendol Hux agrees, as he steps into the cell. His tone is almost even, but Sloane can hear it on the verge of snapping. 

“ _And I appreciate your concern,_ ” Rax says, approaching with a hand affectedly pressed to his breast, “ _and loyalty, as always, but for now I ask for your patience—_ ”

Hux lunges forward and strikes Rax across the face with the baton. Rax reels backwards with a choked howl of alarm, buckling as the backs of his knees slam against the bed. “ _What are you—!?_ ”

The baton comes down again, and this time it’s sparking with energy. Rax screams and writhes as it presses down on his shoulder.

“ _You think I’d forget? You think I ever forgot for one karking second?_ ” Hux draws in a breath and then kicks Rax as hard as he can, in the stomach. _“You kriffing bloviating piece of nerfshit! It was you, you planned it all! You brought the blockade!_ ”

“ _It was a test!_ ” Rax shrieks. “ _I never thought she’d be k—”_

_“Leave the wife and leave. The. Mother! Your orders! Or were they Sloane’s?_ ”

Rax shields himself with his arm, desperately gabbling. “ _They were mine, mine, yes! But I couldn’t have— I had no hand in it! How could I have forced her to—_ ”

“ _You let the New Republic take Arkanis! You! You stood by while—_ ” Hux slams the baton against Rax’s kneecap. “ _And then— gloated. You were so. Proud!”_

And Rax shuts up, clamps his jaw tight and keens in agony as the shock baton digs into his gut, before another scream bursts out. Then Sloane hears her own voice from the recording, and the interrogator droid drops down from the ceiling.

Sloane turns off the hologram, and sits back. She doesn’t completely understand, but she gathers the gist of it. _So that’s why Hux hates me_ , she thinks, amazed. _And Rax just as much._ _His lover is dead because of us_. She had no idea he cared.

But it _is_ on her. She relayed the orders to her operative without batting an eyelash. Sloane wonders if Hux’s son, the pale and bitter-eyed little Armitage, will come to hate her as well, when he learns the truth. He’d have every right to. Everything makes less and more sense, at the same time.

She remembers Hux’s open, ugly weeping, too. As she accused him of mistreating his son. It never occurred to her it could have come from anything but pain and humiliation, but before the fight in the exercise hall, Sloane would not have believed Rax could show remorse or grief, either.

No, she won’t execute Hux. Just this damn once. Twice. But it’s the last time. As they say on Ganthel, three strikes and he’s out. 

“Of course it isn’t him,” one of the troopers can be heard muttering, as if they’re right outside the door. “New kind of clone, what else? You’ve seen them running tests. They wouldn’t do that to an admiral.” 

“My credits are on reconditioning. Whatever she did with those rebel prisoners. She can’t be happy with him after he lost the fleet on Jakku.” Muted laughter. 

Sloane’s mouth is slightly agape. 

“It seems our escort,” murmurs a voice behind her, “is unaware of the one-way eavesdropping feature here in the Officers’ Row.” 

Crossing her arms and holding back heat under her skin, Sloane turns sharply on her heel. “Apparently so. Hearing gossip will be one of your new perks. I hope you’re pleased.”

With his drab clothes and mussed hair, Rax is dismally out of place in these finer quarters, although the glint of cruel amusement in his expression begins to restore some of his old vigor. “They think very highly of you, don’t they? Notes of fear and admiration played in harmony. Oh, I know you hate it. You hated the Chandrila attack. But I promised it would make you a hero, and I have kept that promise.”

Sloane can’t help but recall Hux’s comments, about Rax needing an in, needing a symbol to prove himself with, and that symbol being her. But that’s coming from Hux, who may have spent time in Rax’s inner circle, but who is still an insolent brute with every reason to undermine her. She doesn’t need to dwell on his pearls of wisdom. 

“And they remember you for a gross debacle of a battle,” she reminds him. “It doesn’t look so good without your planned grand finale.”

Rax grins, his eyes pinch; he is stung, and is hiding it. “And you could have finished it. You could have destroyed the entire Republic fleet, along with…” He purses his lips in thought. “Ah, yes. As you said, the worst of the Empire. Those mad enough to follow me. And every pathetic wretch on that planet, of course. Slithering Niima and her slaves. Lowlifes hiding out from their lowlife enemies. Toiling miners and moisture farmers. The anchorites already think life is punishment enough.” He is already retreating backwards into the chambers, with a half-bow and a sweeping gesture. “But Rae Sloane is eternally merciful.” 

“I see you’re feeling better already,” Sloane remarks, smiling thinly. If that sardonic tone was meant to get under her skin, Rax hasn’t fully recovered. The tickle of aggravation in her chest is a far cry from the chills he used to give her with nothing but a glance. “You won’t be able to leave without permission, of course. You will have regular visits to the exercise hall; you seem well enough for that. And the room monitors your vital signs, but you won’t have cameras on you.” 

“Oh. Generous. I will try to enjoy myself.” He gives a sidelong look. She returns it stubbornly. 

The new quarters are still far plainer than Sloane knows Rax prefers, and he has already found the closet and is frowning at the wardrobe selection. But the rooms are spacious, and have viewports, and there is a carefully curated terminal with a selection of holobooks and strategy games. There are even a few ornamental pieces transferred from the _Imperialis_. It might not keep him from chewing up audiochips, but the new setting could encourage him to act with more decorum. 

“I spoke to Hux,” Sloane says. “He has offered some interesting opinions. About you.”

“What sort? I wouldn’t worry about— Oh, what’s this?”

Rax is kneeling by the bed. A lump in Sloane’s throat hops like a treefrog. How in the stars did he think to look there right away? As he pulls the carved wooden chest out from the space under the bed, and bewilderment becomes a cocktail of suppressed emotions, Sloane considers making herself scarce. 

“You could use a hobby,” she says, retreating to the doorframe.

Rax opens the chest. It is as it was when Sloane found it aboard the _Imperialis_. Packets, vials, large sealed bags, bare dried specimens. Rax is on his feet in a flash, pursuing her, matching her slow but deliberate pace. “The seeds. From the garden. You kept them.”

Sloane’s hand fumbles for the panel by the door. “Grow yourself some food,” she says, as the lock scans her palm.

“Rae, I—“

Her pulse climbs. He has her cornered. Then the doors slide open, and she’s stepping back into the hall, where the chatty escort startles to attention. Rax freezes as soon as she is over the threshold. 

“Well, I’m busy,” Sloane says. “As always. We can’t all lounge about.”

Rax presses his lips into a thin, tight line and stalks back into his new living room. 

A week later, he is waiting for her at the door. His hair is combed, his chin smooth-shaven, and he has an earthy scent on his skin. 

Though she said she’d take him to the exercise hall, she can only work up the courage to visit after beating the punching bags until her hands throbbed. Her jacket rests loosely on her shoulders, baring her undershirt, and sweat has dampened her hair. She feels as muggy and overheated as she did on Akiva. 

A pale young vine is already creeping out of a carved crystal pot on the table, wrapping tendrils around a pair of thin rods sticking out of the soil. That strange life essence from Jakku must be overflowing from its chosen vessel — this is how Sloane has elected to think of Rax, from his vague comments about the mystical nature of the borehole. She thinks of the aged anchorite too, who Rax has long since admitted to killing out of vengeful spite. _Life, and death, that feeds new life. Seeds will grow in dead ground_.

Sloane stands by the viewport, as if the frigidity of space might seep through enough to cool her off. “I did kill her,” she says hollowly. “Adea.”

Rax reaches out to her, and he makes such a cautious motion, his knuckles brushing the outside of her wrist. He wants to hold her hand, and he wants never to touch her there again. The gesture is clumsy, with the memories of their first fight still ugly and sharp, and yet it is kind. Sloane wonders where he learned anything of kindness. It must have been from an opera.

“And I let her die,” he tells her. “I didn’t listen to her. She was right and I was lost in a fantasy.”

Now that she has emptied her heart, there’s room for distant curiosity. “What was she right about?” _What were you fantasizing about?_

“That you were not pleased with me. That I would need to do more than wait.” 

“It sounds like she had more sense than you.”

“She must have; she always beat me at shah-tezh.” He smiles, and it’s genuinely fond. Sloane feels lighter, buoyant. It eases her mind to think that Adea might have felt that fondness, thought of it before her end. 

Then she lets herself sink back down somberly, seeing through the comforting deception. “She did attack me, too.” It’s the last thing she has to let go of. She could accept that she killed the young woman who was not her daughter, if she could blame Rax for it. It is harder to accept that Adea had made the decision herself. But in that moment, Sloane’s betrayer shouldn’t have expected anything but lethal retaliation. “Even if she could have shot me in the back, and didn’t. She gave me one last chance to join you.” _Risked her life to avoid destroying something she knew you wanted._

She reminds herself this is her own mind talking. How could she know? Unless she has let Hux’s comments get to her, though she thought she knew better. 

Again the brush against her wrist. “You gave us enough chances, too many.”

“I thought fire forged some blades.” _And ruins others._

“You aren’t ruined.” 

More uncharacteristic kindness. So he heard what went unspoken. _But I am, Rax. Or I will be. Just by a bigger fire than yours._

The fire is in her already; her skin is burning, but it cools as he slowly lays a hand to her shoulder. It isn’t enough. She wants more. More lies to narrow down the truth.

“Am I—” She’ll seem mad, but she continues— “anything like her? Or if I wasn’t then, am I now?”

His bewilderment would be reassuring, but he’s taking her question seriously. “I think she was quite like how you were once. But I assumed you knew that.”

“I did. But I was _wrong_ about her, so why is it so easy to hear things in her…?” It isn’t the right word, but she makes an attempt. “Her frequency.”

What is she saying? She doesn’t want to hear this come to light, but it has been lying in wait for her: You knew her all along, you knew what she wanted, you just didn’t notice that desire came from her, because it came from you too. You weren’t surprised when she took his side, it was like a piece of you split off and tried to fight back, once you’d made up your mind on who the enemy was. And now that same piece of you, that same desire, comes slinking back all bruised and humbled, because you let it live and nothing dies anymore.

“Go on.” He knows there must be an explanation coming.

She’ll seem even madder, and still she continues. “People I’ve known seem to live in my head. I can sense the world, through them. Like traces or ghosts, advising me.”

“… a council of shadows…?”

“Force damn you,” she grumbles, while he quietly laughs. “I tried to keep only the best, or make do with what I had. I can’t take everyone in, it’d be like…” 

“Like blinding light. Like cacophony.”

“But people are so erratic anyway… Ghosts it was. The dead were better behaved.” She laughs this time. “She said she’d be with me. And she is.”

“And that was to be my fate, too. To be with you.”

“Aren’t you, already?”

He stares at her, she stares back, he starts grinning like a zealot having a revelation.

“You’re joking, but you mean it, and you are as terrifying as always.”

“Me? Terrifying?”

“Transfixing. Like a pin in a butterfly’s wing.” 

Almost in a daze, she touches a finger to his shoulder and presses. Gently at first, then hard enough for him to suck in air sharply between his teeth. But the skin doesn’t break.

“Your turn,” she says. 

Shock crosses his features as she grips his hand in hers and tugs it closer, laying it over the knotted scar on her side, the roughness tangible through her undershirt. Enough time has passed that she needs this again, needs it to complete her.

“Go on. Go _on_. Do it. Make it hurt.”

With a soft growl, he catches her by her waist and pulls her close. It startles her — that he would be sick of pretense first.

“ _Rae_ ,” he says. The change is unmistakable. An actor breaking character.

 _Who are you?_ she’d once asked, as if she expected to recognize him. Does he know her; does she, him? Is he a ghost of the past? That can’t be it. Some believe the future brings its own traces; not to her, surely, but it’s another trick her mind can play. 

The delusion of familiarity washes over her. “Galli.” 

Where their chests press against each other, she can feel the frantic flutter of both heartbeats. Dark, untamed fire burns in the pits of his eyes. But, to her relief, he’s still cold enough to soothe her scalding blood. “I’ll do anything to you,” he breathes against her cheek. “Anything but that.”

“Then _do_ anything; it took you long enough,” she chokes out, even as he silences her with a kiss.

What affirms her is the reminder of the physical. And he is everywhere in her physicality.

He has unwrapped her, garments thrown aside in a heap, even her hair tie is lost somewhere in the bedsheets. His hands have mapped her form completely, his tongue has savored every drop of moisture she cannot hold in. The brine of her tears, the metal in her blood where his teeth break skin, the musk of her sweat, the sour spice of her arousal. 

At one point, he presses a synthskin membrane between the cheeks of her backside and moves in to devour her there too. By then, she cannot string two words together, and it’s just as well that she can’t comment on this — or ask for more. _Do anything_ , she’d said.

What he asks for, flushed tip taunting soft and swollen folds, she gives by taking, fingers digging into his hips to pull him to her. It is a mere formality; they both know he split her open and laid her bare long ago. 

Then he is the pressure rocking in and out between her legs, the taut stretch of spread thighs and an arched back, the firm press of fingers squeezing under her knees, the tightly held breath, the faint itch-soothing burn of friction and the slick massage of fluid and perspiration. He is replenishment, charging her like a hand-cranked battery, winding her up like a mechanical timepiece. It’s lewd and rough, then rhythmic and deliberate — so _attentive_ , answering every need with masterful care. 

He’s as good as she hadn’t dared to imagine, matching the skill in seduction she’d raged at him for seeming to withhold, as if she wasn’t worth the effort. But could it be that she was worth too much? Her heart is sore, still bruised, it still pangs from memories of pain and betrayal that no amount of kindness could overwrite. Her head and throat are filled with hot static, trying its damnedest to drown out everything that can’t be overwritten.

His voice is the melody that ties it all together. “Is it good, Rae? Just like that? Yes, _yes_ , that’s it, tell me, tell me. Let me help, let me make it right. Oh, darling, you need this, I know.”

She cries out — for him, for something to promise her real relief, and he sheds tears against her brow, kisses the sides of her mouth until she stops gasping for air, and then closes their lips together. The taste of him, of herself, of his hunger for her, bubbles like champagne. 

Her legs have locked tightly around his waist, and he’s trembling, and so is she, and where they meet, they share one pulse. 

They lie together silently after that, not meeting each other’s gazes. Her eyes on the ceiling, his in the pillow. Perhaps it will be a rude shock to return to their senses and realize what they’ve done. But his hand still absently strokes her chest.

They’re drenched in sweat; it seals their bare skin together. When Sloane’s mind drifts, it returns to the exercise hall, and she is jolted awake by an errant thought, holding her breath until she feels a bead of moisture evaporate as it slides down. It isn’t blood. 

But with that flinching fear, her afterglow is snuffed out. She stirs and leaves the bed, heading for the refresher. With each step, a concern deepens that she might seal herself in that tiny metal-walled room and never leave. 

She looks back. Rax has finally turned his head to stare at her, and he has the same intensely blank expression that she expects she’s wearing. It isn’t until his expression shifts into something more human that she recoils from it, takes a step back into the ‘fresher and shuts the door.

 

On Jakku, she’d been so close to killing him. Wrath had been roaring in her ears, pulsing in her fingers, telling her to fire one more shot. It wasn’t mercy that stopped her. In that moment, she saw nothing in her future besides this final taste of satisfaction. Just let it linger a little more, don’t end it yet. He was already bleeding out, already dying, he had to be. Consciousness fading from his eyes. The sweetness of revenge dissolving as well, brushing up against a void that chilled her bones, a place where hope went to decay. As she returned to the body a second time, to tear off a piece of the blood-stained cape, she felt a faint breath against her skin, stirring the stagnant air. 

There was no urgency at that point. She could wait. Why not savor every last second? It had made sense at the time to sit, tired and hazy-headed, on the steps, while the body faded into death.

Strangely, it _was_ what she needed. The fatigue lessened. The ache of her injuries receded bit by bit. Her thoughts were clearer, cooler. At last they were clear enough to focus and blink away her trance. The body laying at her feet filled its chest with air, sighed it out. In the ground, through her feet and core, there came a hum, like the earthquakes that threatened to split the planet apart were stirring awake as well. But it wasn’t a death knell; it was as steady as a heartbeat. 

Two bodies, vessels into which poured the inexorable, tectonic, geologic weight of _life_. 

Cold water droplets slide down Sloane’s chin before she wipes them away with a hand towel. It doesn’t do much good. She stares into the dark drain of the washbasin she’s bracing herself against, wondering if her stomach will finally expel its contents. How long has she sustained herself on spoiled, rancid faith? How has she kept it all down? What has she let herself become?

_You killed a man, and when he wouldn’t die, you—_

It might be manageable, she tells herself.

It’s not. Her head drops down towards the basin as her balance wavers. She tells herself this is far from the worst thing she’s seen anyone do over her military career. She supposes it’s far from the worst thing _she’s_ done. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fics that are not required reading but that are canon-compliant with this one:
> 
> [A Garden Beyond Right and Wrong](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11783718) \- set in the middle of Life Debt; context for Rax's gardening hobby and extra relationship backstory
> 
> [The Empire Needs Children](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7843036) \- context for Armitage's mother (if I finish it)
> 
> [A Slip of Paper](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16185455) \- Brendol Hux's cipher decoded


	3. Interlude: the Imperials, Three Months Ago

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An incident with a child, a Grand Admiral, and an outcast. CW child abuse/harm, Sloane is not a responsible adult, but she eventually improves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was written by Adsecula, with only a bit of beta'ing and a few contributions from me! It was also written way, way, back, not long after Empire's End first came out. This is the definitive original Prisoner AU, and I adore it so much! I couldn't not include it in this fic, since it was my inspiration and it codified so many ideas I ended up having about these characters and this ship.

 

One child, a tall girl, stumbles and skids across the floor. She gets up, but having lost her stun weapon, there is little more for her left to do. Her partners quickly form a retreat. The opposing children circle around her, finally getting a chance to cut apart the attacking formation.

She tenses, posing in a defensive stance. The others glance up at their squadron leader.

Armitage bites his lip and gives a solemn nod.

The children begin to savagely beat the girl.

Rae’s battered ribs twinge in memory of her own injuries, as yet not even properly healed. Her lip curls upwards in a scowl of disapproval. She doesn’t wince or shift her gaze away.

The girl is now gasping in pain, but her face is still utterly blank. Armitage orders her to fight back. She is being held fast by two of the children, but she obediently begins to kick in earnest — until her feet give way.

Rae feels her breath begin to shorten. It’s as if her lungs are two sizes too small, or perhaps the stale recycled air of the ship has petered out.

This is too near to her, she realizes: it somehow reminds her too much of what she herself would have become that night she ran away from home, had she not fought tooth and nail for her freedom. A puppet. A slave.

No, Rae doesn’t like this at all.

She excuses herself, adopting a bored expression as she passes by the Hux family. She will not show any of them even a hint of weakness.

Still, her discomfort squirms within her for the next few days, until it matures into anger at her own indecisiveness. Is she not a true leader? Can she not put a stop to a program, one that she disapproves of within her very heart?

Rae admits to herself that it is not so simple. She truly does feel a mixture of pity and revulsion towards these unusual children — both the orphans of Jakku and even young Armitage —but now is hardly the time to unleash the potential dangers of their free will on board her small ship.

 

She sees the tall girl again, during meal times. Her face is blue with bruises and her knuckles are raw. She has become a favorite fighter of Armitage, it seems.

It’s not so much the battered body that burns into Rae’s mind — it’s the permanently expressionless, listless, mindless face. Compliant to any order. She can’t stand to witness it.

Rae approaches Brendol Hux on the next day. She is brief and unapologetic.

“Go to the medbay. I will need you to oversee a permanent removal of the control device from one of the children.”

Hux opens his mouth to complain. She cuts off any protest by grabbing his arm and twisting it back, hard.

“Fine, yes, fine,” he says, alarmed. “Any child you want in particular?”

“Yes. That girl,” she points through the glass pane, as if picking out a pet from a store window. “The tall one. Do it now.”

Hux licks his lips and scrambles away, out of Rae’s reach.

“Know that it might break the whole training routine,” he mutters in warning as he leaves, still nursing his arm.

“It had better, or I’ll break _you_ ,” Rae whispers back.

 

Releasing the girl from her mind control chip does not solve Rae’s worries.

Hux arrives to her quarters one evening, bowing obsequiously. Rae allows him to take a seat next to her desk.

“Grand Admiral. Please excuse my intrusion into your time.”

“Of course. What is it?”

“We may have a problem,” he gulps. “With one of the cadets.”

Rae lifts an eyebrow. They are hardly cadets, she wants to say. She doesn’t know what to call them - Jakku’s youngest wardogs, maybe. The folly of Hux and Rax. Sloane’s shame. So many possible names.

She is handed a datapad. It shows the efficiency of each individual soldier in the mock battles. One child’s diagram shows a sharp decline. Rae groans and pinches her nose.

“The one whose control chip I ordered removed, I am correct in assuming?”

“Yes. That girl is still training, only her brain is now fully aware. So she’s holding back in fights, she’s avoiding pain — letting fear in. I have put in too many hours of work into her to allow for failure, yet her behavior might lead to consequences as the program gets more… difficult.”

“The Empire needs children,” Rae interjects with a hiss. “Not _corpses_.”

“You wish for her to survive? _Good._ The chip can easily be reinserted — it is a painless procedure, I assure you.”

“No. You misunderstand me. I want her entirely removed from the training program, for the whole duration of our stay on board the _Imperialis_. When we reach the remaining forces, the rest of the children will have their controls removed too, one by one.”

Hux’s eyes widen. His jowl works desperately for several moments.

“Very well,” he says finally. “What should I do with her in the meantime?”

“She is no longer required to work or to be part of the training group. She can stay in the data center and read useful materials, or keep to her quarters and amuse herself otherwise as she sees fit."

Hux seems conflicted, yet does not utter a word to contradict her. Good. He is learning.

Rae smiles. She says quietly:

“Tell her that the Grand Admiral grants her _freedom_.”

 

Rae is present behind the glass partition when Hux tells the child the news. His behavior is surprisingly kindly.

She regards the child’s reaction. Nothing. There is no joy, no visible relief nor traces of gratitude. She appears as equally blank and compliant as before her mind was freed.

Jakku, it seems, makes for very broken orphans.

Hux turns to gaze up at Rae. His face is schooled into calmness, but a corner of his mouth is twitching.

 

That same night, Rae awakens to quiet, quiet footsteps in her room. She has had trouble sleeping in recent nights, ever dreaming of burning star destroyers: every scrape and click of the ship makes her wake up in cold sweat.

This is no background noise, however. No imaginings in the night. Someone really is in this room — and they do not mean her well.

Rae pretends to still be asleep, keeping her eyes veiled and slowly shifting sideways to the direction of the footsteps.

She allows the intruder to draw closer to her bed. Absurdly, her first half-formed thought is that it is Rax. She next thinks of Hux and recalls the dark look he had given her.

The figure draws close enough to see. It isn’t even a man. It’s the girl she saved, the blank-faced orphan. She’s holding a wickedly long, black-bladed knife, carefully positioning it towards Rae’s throat.

Rae’s hand suddenly snakes up and slams into the girl’s face. The knife cuts across Rae’s jawline; slips to the floor with a clatter.

The girl is quick to react, jumping away and viciously kicking at Rae’s face. The girl scrambles for the fallen knife, grabs the sharp blade and rushes forward to attack.

In a haze, Rae reaches for the blaster kept beneath her pillow, aims it and—

“No!” The girl shrieks, halting abruptly. Her face is still blank, but there is something like fear dancing in her eyes now.

“Drop the knife,” Rae orders. The girl only grips it more firmly.

“Who told you to do this? Was it Rax, back on Jakku — was it the Counselor?”

No answer.

“You belong to Rax? You do, don’t you?”

The girl is silent. Rae approaches her, shaking with rage.

“ _Tell me!_ ” Rae roars. There’s hot blood dripping from her jaw, but she doesn’t care. She abruptly kicks the girl in the stomach, leaves the child doubled over on the floor. No mercy for traitors.

“Who was it?” She demands again, stepping on the now abandoned knife, aiming the blaster at the thin figure on the floor.

_ No mercy. _

“No one,” the girl says, her face as expressionless and inhuman as ever.

“Was it _Hux?_ Did _he_ tell you to do this?”

Rae makes her chrome-plated blaster click loudly. She aims at the head.

“No,” the girl says, in a small voice.

“Last chance. Answer me or I swear I will blow your brains out. Who gave you the order to kill me? You have five seconds. Five. Four. Three. Two…”

The girl’s entire face distorts in a myriad of raw emotions, the mask of her indifference finally crumbling. She looks like a wild animal caught in a steel trap.

“No one!” The child howls. “It was me! Only me! Please! I don’t want to die!”

Rae blinks rapidly.

“Why—”

“Because you want me _dead!_ ” the girl sobs. “I had to try to save myself! What did I do wrong? What did I _do?_ I did everything they told me to!”

“Who said I wanted you dead?”

“You did! You— you cut me out of the group! The instructor told me you didn’t want me to work there anymore!”

“You were suffering. It was a meant to be a kindness…”

“I can take it!” The child is hysterical, weeping and pawing in supplication at the hem of Rae’s night clothes. “I can work better, I can be a good soldier! I’ll prove it, I promise!”

Rae steps back, appalled, away from the child’s grip.

“If I’m not part of the group, I can’t make it on my own! _No one_ survives alone. No one. Who will want to give me food if I’m _useless_ … Please. I don’t want to die. Don’t make me a… a…”

Rae closes her eyes for a moment.

“An outcast,” she breathes out.

“Yes.”

“Is that what happens to outcasts in the desert? They starve? Die?”

“Yes. I have seen it.”

Rae finally lowers the blaster. She feels drained.

“Ah,” she tells the sobbing child. “I see.”

So. In the end, it all comes back to Jakku.

“Get up,” Rae sighs wearily. The girl looks up at her fearfully, her lip trembling.

Rae shakes her head. Is this what she has been turned into? Is this what her Empire will become? Threatening the weak and powerless into mindless obedience was not her vision for the future.

The girl is still quivering on the floor. Rae tries to imagine how one inspires real loyalty in a vicious desperate thing. Concepts like security and order, which had so inspired her own self when she had been living in squalor, surely must seem laughable this wild creature.

“Listen,” she growls. “You work for the Empire now. We _always_ take care of our own.”This is a lie, but right now Rae believes with all her heart that she will make it into the truth.“You’ll get your chance to grow up strong. Give my Empire your respect and I’ll make sure you always get enough food to feed you twice over. Every day. Deal?”

She reaches out with her good hand. The other still has swelling and bruising on two fingers. The girl hesitates, still suspicious.

“Come on. Up you get. I’d say a visit to the medical bay is in order for both of us.”

The girl takes her hand, almost shyly. Rae helps her would-be killer to stand up. This is absurd, she thinks.

Then again, Rae’s recent life has been anything but sane.

As they walk out into the corridor, Rae grunts out: “And if you have a complaint, take it up with your superiors verbally before resorting to amateur assassination attempts. Next time, you’ll only wind up dead.”

 

She can tell that girl feels less than comfortable in the darkened area of the medbay. Her face has gone carefully blank again and her posture is quite stiff. Rae can’t blame her. A sense of death looms quite strongly here.

A near-corpse is on the surgery table next to them. The room reeks of his blood, from how it has soaked and dried into the white uniform he has yet to be stripped of. He’s oozing blood through his wounds; wheezing it out of his nose and mouth with every irregular, ragged breath. His eyes are still wide open, glazed over and unseeing. Every time she visits, Rae hopes for the sake of simplicity that he is dead: unfortunately, when she turns on the stark white lights, he slowly turns his head away.

“What happened to him?” the girls asks, with a clinical interest at the wounds.

“I did,” Rae replies, simply.

“It looks _disgusting_. Can he feel it? Can I try touching it?” the girl asks, pointing at a particularly ugly blaster wound on his shoulder.

Sadistic little rat, Rae thinks, as she cleans up the gash on her jaw. It isn’t too deep, but it stings like hell. One more injury to endure, she supposes.

Rae shrugs and remarks: “Well, _I_ certainly won’t stop you.” At least the girl doesn’t seem to have any outstanding loyalty to the man who took her off Jakku. Kidnapped her, rescued her, however she wants to see it.

Gallius Rax murmurs a syllable.

“He said your name,” the girl tells Rae bluntly, while Rae’s skin prickles all over. “I think he did. Is he awake? Can he hear us?”

“I don’t think he’s awake,” Rae tells her, though it might be a lie, a convenient one to divert the girl’s attention. “But maybe he can hear us, and he’s dreaming.”

The girl’s finger hovers over the injury, eager to poke it, perhaps just to see him twitch, but her face clouds and she withdraws. “So he’s an outcast,” she says. “But you take care of him anyway. Is that how it works?”

The word ‘outcast’ stirs the man from his stupor. Another sound escapes him, this one unintelligible.

“I suppose.” Another convenient lie. “Are you going to stare at him all night? Come over and put on a few bacta patches. It will help those bruises heal faster.”

The girl complies, showing vague interest in the patches, little gel packs sealing against her skin. “They look like bloodsuckers.”

“I’ve thought that too,” Rae admits. “Here, take a few more. You can put them on yourself, can’t you?”

Nodding, the girl accepts the handful of patches, clutching them to her chest as if they are food portions. She looks a bit giddy, perhaps indulging a fantasy of being rich by the standards of her impoverished home planet.

Rae heads for the door, and the girl ambles along behind her, but stops and returns to Rax’s cot, curiosity insatiable.

She does poke the wound a couple of times, snickering to herself at the tiny transgression, while Rax’s muscles flinch.

“Clean your hands, if you please,” Rae admonishes. “Use the wipes.”

The girl does reach for the wipes. Before she cleans off, though, a whim strikes her and she unpeels the sticker backing on one of her patches and places it on Rax’s shoulder wound. The blob of gel gradually tints pink as blood blooms into it.

Rae’s eyes are wide with uncertainty. Has she been a good influence on the child? Or can this count as a good influence? Maybe, she thinks, the power to be generous is as tantalizing as the power to be cruel. Maybe they are two faces of a coin.

She can’t pretend she hasn’t chased the honeyed taste of virtue before.

The girl pats Rax’s hand. “Give the Empire your respect,” she says. So she’s just parroting Rae, now. And sounds ever so satisfied doing so.

“Well done,” Rae tells her exhaustedly. “All right. Let’s go.”

 

There is not much thought, at first. Points of pain riddle through brief moments of seeing bright lights, or hearing a roaring rush of sound.

There is no comprehension of time, either. Some of the pain is sharp, lancing into his flesh like so many knives. Other parts of him ache dully, easily tearing out shallow gasps from his mouth if his body is shifted in any way.

He feels cold and burning, all at once.

It is a simple existence. It doesn’t last, to his regret.

With time, the raw wounds subside into itches and throbbing. His mind slowly begins to emerge, spitting out memories and self-loathing and half-fevered dreams.

When he becomes strong enough to feed himself soup and to stand up on shaking legs, he is moved to a small cell.

There is no longer an ooze of blood and sweat on his sheet these days. His pillow is still wet with saliva and mucus and tears, though. He doesn’t make an effort to stop this.  Why should he?

There are no visitors, save for the droid which brings him his meal and his medicine. He is tended to as a plant, or perhaps a laboratory mouse: clinically, without cruelty or kindness. He thinks this is far more decent treatment than he deserves for his failures, which confuses him. He can think of no reason why he is still alive.

“I should like to know something,” he quietly croaks out one day. His voice is hoarse from disuse.

The serving droid adjusts its head to one side, clearly allowing him to continue speaking.

“Am I in the custody of the Empire? Or perhaps in a New Republic prison?”

The droid makes a whirring noise, as if in deep thought. “You are in a vessel of the First Order.”

“Explain,” he says, feeling his head begin to ache with new questions.

“You are capable of lucid communication?” it asks him instead.

He nods mutely. Without awaiting for any further proof, the droid abruptly folds itself up and leaves. Rax is left only with the familiarity of silence, slowly closing in on him from all sides.

It is then that she finally comes to him and makes known her demands.

 

He wakes up one morning to find an audio device on his table. There are dozens of data chips next to it, each capable of storing hundreds of hours worth of sound files. He immediately recognizes the chips by their uniquely crafted covers: they were once his, all filled up with the finest music imaginable, ready to listen to as he thought up any of his plans worth knowing.

His breath hitches and he is up from the cot bed, stumbling towards the chance to end this torturous silence he lives in.

There is a message flashing on the device.

_To help kill your time._ \- Sloane

He opens the device eagerly, hands shaking and mouth open in awe. He knows he’s pathetic. He doesn’t care at all. His mouth splits into a smile of genuine gratitude. In this moment, he feels he’d die for Rae.

He manages to place one chip into the device and presses the play button, with raw desire aching in his heart.

His breath is knocked out from him. But this is not music!

It is a recording of a meeting. He punches a button to fast forward onto the next audio file. It is a speech by an admiral overseeing colonization. The file after that is a declaration of new security measures for droid memory wipes.

He feverishly tries out chip after chip, file after file, yet no hope remains. All his music is gone, replaced by flows of First Order information.

Eventually, he stops crying.

When he is done lying curled up, he gives a sigh and makes himself listen to all the recordings. It takes weeks. He analyzes what he hears. Thinks hard.

Thus the next time Rae Sloane enters his cell, he is acquainted enough with current events to offer suggestions of improvement to her ideas.

Her hands end up on his throat at one point, after a particularly incautious remark, but more recordings are later delivered to him. Some examples even show that certain of his advice was heeded after all.

He nurses the faint bruises along his neck and grins. It’s the closest he has felt to being alive in— no, not months, it really is— years.

 

“I can show you,” he says, and she allows him access to align the charts differently. She waits patiently, glaring hawk-eyed at his progress.

He occasionally glances at her as he works, and smiles waveringly.

It isn’t fear or respect he gives her, nor even hatred. He imagines she could live with any of that: she could even draw deep satisfaction from it.

No; what he gives her is a curiously hungry look, as if she is the very sun, and looking upon her might illuminate him. And she is uncomfortable, clearly.

When he is finally done, he offers the screen back with a polite bow. She shivers and hastily makes her exit, muttering a sole word of thanks.

She doesn’t trust him, of course, never will — not until her own teams confirm the veracity of his adjustments. But his knowledge was correct, as she will soon find out.

She has been digging into the grueling work of deciding where her rule should first take root, in this unknown galaxy full of opportunities. All he can do is serve her will, as he ought to. As he, perhaps, was destined to.

But Rae forgets about her prisoner for quite some time, likely caught up in the elation of finally reaping gains from her efforts.

Without her, there is nothing to do. The cell feels like it is cutting his spirit into shreds. He feels he will go mad, all over again. He’d rather have bled to death on Jakku than have been reduced to this.

He picks out a favorite audio file to calm himself. He has no music, not anymore, not in any true sense. What he _has_ is a long speech by Rae Sloane — he forgets right now what it was about.

Her voice is like liquid bronze.

 

The next time she arrives to Rax’s cell, it is quite surprisingly to ask him about his childhood on Jakku.

And so, haltingly, he drags himself back to his earliest memories, and starts from the beginning.

Rae frowns all the while, tapping her foot and brusquely interjecting. But to Rax's aching mind she is warm and radiant, because she is listening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BTS note: the girl was originally meant to be Phasma! (I still think it would have been a good idea to make Phas one of the Jakku orphans, instead of having that for a side character in her story.) But she's her own character now! I'm quite fond of her.


End file.
